“Apparently, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), vaccines don’t work anymore. That a science thing? Inoperative. We got more important things to worry about, like politics. Has there ever been an institution in American public life that has discredited itself more rapidly, than the CDC?” – Senator Ted Cruz
Cruz makes a good point, and history tends to back him up. The following is taken from Wikipedia, which covers the CDC’s role in the heinous Tuskegee Experiment.
The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (informally referred to as the “Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment”, the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study”, the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male”, the “U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee”, or the “Tuskegee Experiment”) was an ethically abusive study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The purpose of this study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis. Although the African-American men who participated in the study were told that they were receiving free health care from the federal government of the United States, they were not.
The Public Health Service started the study in 1932 in collaboration with Tuskegee University (then the Tuskegee Institute), a historically black college in Alabama. In the study, investigators enrolled a total of 600 impoverished African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama. Of these men, 399 had latent syphilis, with a control group of 201 men who were not infected. As an incentive for participation in the study, the men were promised free medical care, but were deceived by the PHS, who never informed subjects of their diagnosis and disguised placebos, ineffective methods, and diagnostic procedures as treatment.
The men were initially told that the “study” was only going to last six months, but it was extended to 40 years. After funding for treatment was lost, the study was continued without informing the men that they would never be treated. None of the infected men was treated with penicillin despite the fact that, by 1947, the antibiotic was widely available and had become the standard treatment for syphilis.
The study continued, under numerous Public Health Service supervisors, until 1972, when a leak to the press resulted in its termination on November 16 of that year. By then, 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients’ wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.
The 40-year Tuskegee Study was a major violation of ethical standards, and has been cited as “arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history.” Its revelation led to the 1979 Belmont Report and to the establishment of the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) and federal laws and regulations requiring institutional review boards for the protection of human subjects in studies. The OHRP manages this responsibility within the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Its revelation has also been an important cause of distrust in medical science and the US government amongst African Americans.
About the Author
1933 – 1947 Democrats were in power then. Has anything really changed?
Funk The CDC.
These comments are two reasons Cape Charles is full of idiots.
(There, I can make sweeping generalizations too!)